Larry Walden has a quick response if somebody asks him how much money he poured into building a scale model of the old Allen County Courthouse.
“I put a dollar in it,” he joked.
The dollar, Walden explained, is from four quarters he glued to the wood model, beneath replica flower pots adorning each of the four main entrances.
It’d be easier to describe the rest of his project as priceless.
Walden delivered the replica of Iola’s former landmark — the real one was demolished in 1959 — Wednesday to the Allen County Historical Society.
A master tinkerer, Walden said he had wanted for years to make a model replica of the courthouse. First, he went about researching the building’s history, and pored over any photographs he could find.
The 1/36th scale replica is accurate to the number of windows, flower pots, even a single, small smoke stack that sticks out the roof on one side.
Walden hesitated to guess the total number of hours he spent on the project. He started May 1.
“I know the Fourth of July weekend, I spent 12 hours for four straight days working on it,” Walden said. “I worked on it every day.”
The wood model’s clock tower was the most difficult part of the project.
In his research, Walden found three different numbers for the tower’s height. He started with the tallest number, “but it looked too tall,” and he shortened it.
The old courthouse, built in 1904, was considered one of the area’s most distinctive landmarks for more than half a century.
With its clock tower visible for miles in each direction, many old-timers said the courthouse was a tell-tale marker that they were nearing home.
Alas, county planners decided to replace the stately structure with the existing “shoebox” style building in the late 1950s.
“We were good at tearing things down,” Walden lamented.
As an aside, one of the clocks remains on the square; a second was donated to the Historical Society, while two others were sold to private owners.
